Issue 144

2^nd May 2014

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Like quite a few other iOS developers, I spent most of this week at Úll so I am feeling refreshed and full of ideas. Unfortunately most of my ideas are now based around how I can fit a BrewBot into our office 😄. Hello to everyone that I bumped into there, great to meet so many of you.

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News

Cancel that iPad app you’re working on. Dustin Curtis has some great analysis which sets the scene for the phone being the replacement for the traditional desktop computer rather than the iPad. I can see the logic, as much as I love my iPad I use my phone for far more useful things already (my iPad mainly gets used for entertainment because of the large screen).

Only last week I mentioned that the one thing I wanted from the iOS 8 SDK was better interaction between apps. Obviously the perfect solution will require implementation by Apple but until the point where that happens, this might be a stop gap.

Tools

This slightly unusual take on using the LLVM static analyser by Andrew Ruef uses the source code for the Heartbleed bug to highlight the bug finding features of the tool. At one point, the static analyser was mainly used to find memory management errors which are not going to be there any more but there are still plenty of good reasons to run it.

Matt Zanchelli with a great tip for the new version of Sketch. Automatically have assets exported, placed into the correct locations and have the asset catalogue updated. This is a massive timesaver and will quickly fit into your design workflow. Even if your designer isn’t familiar with Xcode, once configured this takes no knowledge of Xcode at all.

Code

If you saw the video from last week, it won’t be a surprise that this week saw the release of Facebook’s animation framework taken originally from the Push Pop Press apps, Pop. The API is very similar to that of Core Animation so the learning curve should be pretty smooth and Kimon Tsinteris gives us an introduction in this post. If Facebook keep this level of quality open source release up much longer then soon I’ll need to forgive them for Three20 😉.

Ole Begemann with a Mike Ash style “Let’s Build” for Scroll Views. If you ever needed clarification on the differences between frame and bounds, building a scroll view is the perfect illustration of it. Ole’s final product is missing many of the niceties of scroll views like inertia and bounce animations but it’s impressive what can be achieved with only a few lines of code.

Kim Pedersen with a fascinating article on automatic generation of level data. This isn’t going to be the kind of thing you get to use every day but I found the article a really interesting read. You will also want to check out Part 2 when you’re done.

macOS Development

We get very spoiled by all of the easy, flexible animation APIs on iOS and it’s easy to forget that the situation isn’t quite so rosy on the other side of the platform fence. However it’s not all bad news and in this article Jonathan Willing gives a run down of animation on OS X.

Design

With the release of Pop this week, along with UIDynamics and all of the other animation frameworks that are available, designing animations is an essential part of modern UI design. Grant Liddall has a great post on adding personality, context and educating your user with motion effects.

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And finally...

I love the Debug icon.